1963: THE BIRDS

What’s it about?

Serious lawyer Rod Taylor and free spirit socialite Tippi Hedren have a classic screwball meeting in a San Francisco pet store. He despises her, she loathes him, and no sooner is he out the door than she’s hatching an elaborate prank/flirtation that involves two love birds, a strongly worded letter, and a two-hour drive to a hick town up the coast called Bodega Bay. When Hedren arrives in town, she slowly begins to realize that Taylor is the unblinking eye of a whirling cyclone of female attentions -- including schoolteacher Suzanne Pleshette, jealous mother Jessica Tandy, and an adoring ten year-old sister.

Hedren’s prank is barely implemented when she takes a nasty cut on the head courtesy of a dive-bombing sea gull. As her relationship with Taylor blossoms over the next couple of days, there are several more bizarre bird-related incidents. Things take a frightening turn when a flock of birds brutally attacks a group of schoolchildren -- and from then on out, Bodega Bay is under siege by birds. As more and more birds amass in the town, the residents try to flee -- but Taylor and his family end up trapped in his house for a long and terrifying night.




Is it any good?

So far as I know, THE BIRDS is the only movie that Alfred Hitchcock ever directed that has anything approaching sci-fi themes. And even though the premise is right out of the 1950s sci-fi book of plot lines (crazed animals attack town!), Hitchcock doesn’t really play the sci-fi elements straight. The beginning of the movie really does feel like a screwball comedy, and it’s a good while before the avian antics in Bodega Bay add up to anything worrying. But when they finally do -- watch out! This is also one of Hitchcock’s bloodiest and most explosive movies, with one bird attack ending with a gas station and several cars bursting into bright orange fireballs.

A lot of directors who took on sci-fi movies in the 1950s and 1960s had done work primarily in other genres -- including Howard Hawks, Robert Wise, Irwin Allen, Fritz Lang, Don Siegel, John Frankenheimer, Jack Arnold, and others. So it wouldn’t necessarily have been out of place for Hitchcock to turn out a more traditional sci-fi movie. But THE BIRDS is all over the place as far as tone and style goes, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The screwball opening quickly becomes a Gothic mystery when Hedren arrives in Bodega Bay -- the women who orbit Taylor in the tiny town are like characters out of a Flannery O’Connor story. Then, of course, there’s the frantic action of the bird attacks, long stretches of suspense, and a few horrifically gory moments. In fact, the one genre that Hitchcock doesn’t seem much interested in is sci-fi itself. No reason for the bird attacks is ever given (except for a hysterical accusation that Hedren somehow instigated it) and it’s taken as a given that there’s nothing anybody can do about it except to try and get away.




It’s pretty obvious that the birds are meant to be some kind of symbolic manifestation of psychological something or other. I have no doubt that plenty of papers and theses have been written on what exactly it all “means”, so I’ll leave any speculation in that department to the experts. Instead, I’ll talk about superficial things like special effects. In most of the attack scenes, the birds are superimposed on the film of the actors, presumably using some variation of a green-screen process. It all looks very good from a technical point of view, but there is a bit of a nagging feeling that the actors and the birds aren’t occupying the same physical plane. (Probably because they’re not.) So for me the creepy, suspenseful parts were much more effective than most of the actual bird attacks. The attacks that do work are those that don’t require the birds and actors to interact directly -- there’s a justly famous scene with Hedren trapped in a telephone booth as birds fly amok all around her. But I was equally chilled by neat little touches like a row of broken teacups in a silent house showing that the birds had been there.

I don’t think anybody likes all of Hitchcock’s movies -- not even all of the most famous ones. For me, NORTH BY NORTHWEST and VERTIGO are the weak links. I used to think that THE BIRDS belonged in that category too -- the first time I saw it, years ago, I thought it was horribly boring. These days, I think it’s probably one of the more interesting movies that Hitchcock directed. There are parts of it that I definitely think don’t work too well, but overall the weird world of Bodega Bay, the constantly changing styles, and a few sequences of terrific suspense really add up to something pretty great.




What else happened this year?

-- Jerry Lewis directed and starred in THE NUTTY PROFESSOR.
-- Roger Corman continued to move into the world of (relatively) higher budget pictures with X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES.
-- Ishiro Honda took a break from giant monsters to direct MATANGO, also sometimes called ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE.

If you watch only one sci-fi movie from 1963...

I am not usually a big fan of comedies, but in this case I’d say that THE NUTTY PROFESSOR is the best movie of the year. THE BIRDS isn’t far behind though.